Market failure, a technical term in economics, does not mean any situation where a market fails. It describes situations where individual rationality fails to produce group rationality, where each individual takes the action that he correctly believes is in his interest and most, in the limiting case all, are worse off as a result. One of my standard examples is an army losing a battle and being mostly slaughtered because each of ten thousand soldiers correctly believes that his decision to run has only a small effect on the chance that the line breaks, a large effect on the chance that he gets killed.
The very term "market failure" is a big win for interventionists. I have long disliked the term intensely. Why not replace it with "collective action failure" or anything that doesn't focus solely on markets?
I tend to think that people vote primarily as an act of expression rather than as an attempt to push the probabilities of who gets elected. E.g. millions of people recently voted against Vladimir Putin despite knowing that doing so would surely have no effect on the election results. Thus I don't think it makes sense to label voting as irrational simply because it has an impact of pushing the probability of some political outcome ever so slightly in an unwanted direction.
I think it would be a mistake to model Trump as having no ideological commitments. He has no *policy* commitments, and his ideological commitments are unusual, not non-existent. He supports what he views as best in terms of outcomes for his constituents - The American People, or less generously the 25-30% of the country that seem to support him no matter what happens.
You could perhaps rephrase it even less generously and say that he supports those that are loyal to himself, which is a type of ideological commitment. I think he styles himself as a true champion of the people (at least a strong majority) and wants that to be true, but when pushed will support those that are most loyal as a fallback position.
Saying that he has no ideology makes his movements seem capricious and erratic, which is true in terms of *policy* but not ideology. He supports coal miners and factory workers (among other groups), whether that would entail enacting tariffs, suppressing immigration, subsidizing their lifestyles, or potentially a bunch of other conflicting policies.
He may be wrong about whether those things will benefit the people he intends to benefit, but I think the ideology is consistent and reliable. *Why* he has that ideology, and whether he is altruistic about it (highly doubtful) is a different conversation. If it's a pure patronage system where he benefits those that benefit him, that's still a type of ideology. I would argue that both major parties have been doing similar things for a very long time, just with better presentation and more plausible deniability.
"Market failure, a technical term in economics, does not mean any situation where a market fails. It describes situations where individual rationality fails to produce group rationality, where each individual takes the action that he correctly believes is in his interest and most, in the limiting case all, are worse off as a result."
Both “market failure” and “rationality” naturally invite confusion. Very tentative alternatives:
where <individual optimisation> causes <collective suboptimisation> that is <invisible-hand failure>.
However, that <invisible-hand failure> might well not be spontaneous (or anarchic) but ultimately be caused by state-imposed perverse incentives.
Another problem with assessing a candidate's electability is we have a hard time separating that from how much we like them. People frequently argue that their preferred primary candidate WILL win and is the truly popular choice even when this is obviously false from an outside view.
People voting for the candidate they most agree with in the primaries are probably not being strategic about having a lower chance of winning the general trading off against their potential policy benefits, but genuinely biased.
"If instead they vote in the primary for the candidate whose views are closest to theirs, the obvious explanation for the failure of the median voter theorem to predict which candidate gets nominated, they are making a mistake, being irrational."
I think a large part of the problem is the existence of hard red and hard blue districts, where success is effectively guaranteed by one party. As a result, general elections cease to be relevant for any position that isn't statewide or nationwide (e.g. seats in the City Council, State Legislature, and House of Representatives).
Thus, the primary election for the dominant party becomes the only election that actually matters. As a result, aspiring politicians no longer need to appeal to the moderate majority. Instead, their success is dependent on how much they can appeal to the most extreme partisans, since those are generally the people who are most likely to vote in primaries. This incentivizes politicians to take increasingly extreme positions. In Democrat-controlled cities, this usually means appealing to the social and economic hyper-progressivism of radical leftists, rather than center-left neoliberals. In Republican-dominated rural areas, this usually means appealing to nationalists, traditionalists, the Religious Right, and other social conservatives, rather than moderates or fiscal conservatives. In both environments, it means using populist appeals and vehement opposition to "the establishment" (which in this case effectively just means The Other Side + moderates on your own side).
Once the city, state, and federal governments are filled with extremists who hate the establishment, that's going to have a serious effect on the public perceptions and ideological composition of the Republican and Democratic parties as a whole. It's going to be harder for moderate candidates to make it through primaries, even for Senatorial and Presidential elections where the general election does matter and appointing a moderate would make winning far more likely. If you view the establishment as not merely misguided on policy but actively malicious and evil, and view the moderates in your party as traitors who are secretly in bed with The Other Side, then you'll be far less amenable to the idea of voting for moderates in the primary.
There might be some sort of market failure *not* occurring in non-swing states, although I can't be sure.
The usual logic a voter can take in such a state, if they don't side with the dominant party in that state, is to vote for their real first choice, even if it isn't the other major party. Given that, one might expect a lot of such votes in states such as CA, NY, or TX. But instead, second place goes reliably to the other major party, and it's never even close (AFAIK; I think that if it ever was, I would have heard about it).
Maybe voters are just that loyal to the other major party. Maybe it's lack of marketing or interest. I don't know.
To offer a single data point... my mother, who lives in South Carolina, registered as a Republican this year so she could vote for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary -- not because Haley would be easier to beat, but because it would be less bad if she won. (If we had ranked balloting, she could have cast a sincere ballot for Biden > Haley > Trump, without bothering with primaries.)
The alternative strategy, of voting in the opposite party's primary for the most-outrageous, easiest-to-beat candidate, is a higher-stakes gamble: the odds of getting what you really want are better, but if you lose, you (and, in your opinion, everybody around you) lose bigger.
Did Palin consider running for president in 2008? I wasn't aware of that; I didn't follow American politics at that time, and I can't easily find anything about it.
The very term "market failure" is a big win for interventionists. I have long disliked the term intensely. Why not replace it with "collective action failure" or anything that doesn't focus solely on markets?
Sarah Palin never ran for the presidential nomination.
I tend to think that people vote primarily as an act of expression rather than as an attempt to push the probabilities of who gets elected. E.g. millions of people recently voted against Vladimir Putin despite knowing that doing so would surely have no effect on the election results. Thus I don't think it makes sense to label voting as irrational simply because it has an impact of pushing the probability of some political outcome ever so slightly in an unwanted direction.
I think it would be a mistake to model Trump as having no ideological commitments. He has no *policy* commitments, and his ideological commitments are unusual, not non-existent. He supports what he views as best in terms of outcomes for his constituents - The American People, or less generously the 25-30% of the country that seem to support him no matter what happens.
You could perhaps rephrase it even less generously and say that he supports those that are loyal to himself, which is a type of ideological commitment. I think he styles himself as a true champion of the people (at least a strong majority) and wants that to be true, but when pushed will support those that are most loyal as a fallback position.
Saying that he has no ideology makes his movements seem capricious and erratic, which is true in terms of *policy* but not ideology. He supports coal miners and factory workers (among other groups), whether that would entail enacting tariffs, suppressing immigration, subsidizing their lifestyles, or potentially a bunch of other conflicting policies.
He may be wrong about whether those things will benefit the people he intends to benefit, but I think the ideology is consistent and reliable. *Why* he has that ideology, and whether he is altruistic about it (highly doubtful) is a different conversation. If it's a pure patronage system where he benefits those that benefit him, that's still a type of ideology. I would argue that both major parties have been doing similar things for a very long time, just with better presentation and more plausible deniability.
"Market failure, a technical term in economics, does not mean any situation where a market fails. It describes situations where individual rationality fails to produce group rationality, where each individual takes the action that he correctly believes is in his interest and most, in the limiting case all, are worse off as a result."
Both “market failure” and “rationality” naturally invite confusion. Very tentative alternatives:
where <individual optimisation> causes <collective suboptimisation> that is <invisible-hand failure>.
However, that <invisible-hand failure> might well not be spontaneous (or anarchic) but ultimately be caused by state-imposed perverse incentives.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/rationality-a-libertarian-viewpoint
Another problem with assessing a candidate's electability is we have a hard time separating that from how much we like them. People frequently argue that their preferred primary candidate WILL win and is the truly popular choice even when this is obviously false from an outside view.
People voting for the candidate they most agree with in the primaries are probably not being strategic about having a lower chance of winning the general trading off against their potential policy benefits, but genuinely biased.
"If instead they vote in the primary for the candidate whose views are closest to theirs, the obvious explanation for the failure of the median voter theorem to predict which candidate gets nominated, they are making a mistake, being irrational."
I think a large part of the problem is the existence of hard red and hard blue districts, where success is effectively guaranteed by one party. As a result, general elections cease to be relevant for any position that isn't statewide or nationwide (e.g. seats in the City Council, State Legislature, and House of Representatives).
Thus, the primary election for the dominant party becomes the only election that actually matters. As a result, aspiring politicians no longer need to appeal to the moderate majority. Instead, their success is dependent on how much they can appeal to the most extreme partisans, since those are generally the people who are most likely to vote in primaries. This incentivizes politicians to take increasingly extreme positions. In Democrat-controlled cities, this usually means appealing to the social and economic hyper-progressivism of radical leftists, rather than center-left neoliberals. In Republican-dominated rural areas, this usually means appealing to nationalists, traditionalists, the Religious Right, and other social conservatives, rather than moderates or fiscal conservatives. In both environments, it means using populist appeals and vehement opposition to "the establishment" (which in this case effectively just means The Other Side + moderates on your own side).
Once the city, state, and federal governments are filled with extremists who hate the establishment, that's going to have a serious effect on the public perceptions and ideological composition of the Republican and Democratic parties as a whole. It's going to be harder for moderate candidates to make it through primaries, even for Senatorial and Presidential elections where the general election does matter and appointing a moderate would make winning far more likely. If you view the establishment as not merely misguided on policy but actively malicious and evil, and view the moderates in your party as traitors who are secretly in bed with The Other Side, then you'll be far less amenable to the idea of voting for moderates in the primary.
There might be some sort of market failure *not* occurring in non-swing states, although I can't be sure.
The usual logic a voter can take in such a state, if they don't side with the dominant party in that state, is to vote for their real first choice, even if it isn't the other major party. Given that, one might expect a lot of such votes in states such as CA, NY, or TX. But instead, second place goes reliably to the other major party, and it's never even close (AFAIK; I think that if it ever was, I would have heard about it).
Maybe voters are just that loyal to the other major party. Maybe it's lack of marketing or interest. I don't know.
To offer a single data point... my mother, who lives in South Carolina, registered as a Republican this year so she could vote for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary -- not because Haley would be easier to beat, but because it would be less bad if she won. (If we had ranked balloting, she could have cast a sincere ballot for Biden > Haley > Trump, without bothering with primaries.)
The alternative strategy, of voting in the opposite party's primary for the most-outrageous, easiest-to-beat candidate, is a higher-stakes gamble: the odds of getting what you really want are better, but if you lose, you (and, in your opinion, everybody around you) lose bigger.
Did Palin consider running for president in 2008? I wasn't aware of that; I didn't follow American politics at that time, and I can't easily find anything about it.